A need exists to provide data/output from computerized applications/software products to external sources (clients, other vendors, and partners) in a variety of media. As technological advances in media devices occur (i.e., movement from tape media to CD-ROM or DVD media), a need is, created to allow both legacy and newly developed applications to take advantage of such media. In the past, it has been necessary to directly customize such applications to interface with such third party media devices. It may even have been necessary to provide dedicated third party media devices for these applications. This solution is both cost and labor intensive. This solution becomes even more cumbersome when it is multiplied across all of the applications/systems in use within a given organization. Furthermore, the entire process must be repeated each time an alternative output media is chosen.
Other prior art systems provide proprietary interfaces which facilitate the routing of application data from a specific application to one or more specific output media devices (see, U.S. Pat. No. 5,870,725 issued to Bellinger). These systems, however, are restricted to a predefined source database and require the use of intermediary conversion programs to format the data according to proprietary standards before such data may be produced on the desired media. Furthermore, these systems are not extensible to facilitate the production of different or new types of media.
Therefore, a need exists to provide a flexible and generic method and system for processing output media requests for a variety of media devices across a variety of applications. Furthermore, the system and method must be easily upgradeable to facilitate the addition of newly created media devices.